Few buildings in Western Australia carry the civic weight of the State Buildings complex on the corner of St Georges Terrace and Barrack Street — a cluster of late Victorian and Edwardian structures that housed the colony's treasury, lands office, and public works department from the 1870s onward. When COMO The Treasury opened in 2015, the challenge for architect Kerry Hill and his Singapore-based practice was not to decorate a heritage shell but to complete it, inserting 48 rooms across the historic fabric while adding a new wing that meets the original without deference or apology. Hill's approach to the interiors sets pale ash timber, woven cane chairs with Thonet-influenced bentwood frames, and fine wool carpets against the buildings' existing masonry bones — the dark-painted panelling and original brick fireplaces visible in the heritage rooms giving way, in newer spaces, to bleached timber headboards and linen-pale walls that carry the same quiet restraint. The restaurant sits in the new addition, its perforated metal ceiling and full-height glazing framing views over the city in a language that is contemporary without being aggressive. The 25-metre lap pool, enclosed in a glass-walled structure slotted between old brickwork and a modern service wing, crystallises what Hill achieved across the whole property: the sensation that old and new have been held in careful, unhurried tension rather than forced into false harmony.

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